The unexpected death of my father in 2009 changed the course of my work. I felt profoundly unmoored, stripped of a basic sense of order I'd taken for granted. These paintings reflect the strange, unpredictable, ever-changing wildness of loss and grief.

The sculptural work is an extension of the forms found in my recent paintings. The pompom pieces, for example, reference human organs created in a plush, toy-like form that encourage interaction with the viewer and with each other. The clay pieces draw on the animalistic characters in the paintings.

This body of work layers shapes, lines and color to create tunneling, cascading or exploding forms. They reflect emotional states as well as physical spaces.

The Fingerprint Project links the ideas of personal migration (and identity) and interdependence. I began by collecting molds of friends’ fingertips, casting them in wax and mounting them on light blue fields painted directly on the wall in groupings that mimic animal migratory patterns. Shadows were added with sumi ink and powdered graphite so that it's hard to tell what's on the wall and what's hovering above it. This ambiguity is a metaphor for the co-creative acts of relationships and migration.

This work springs from having spent a year traveling between New York City and Raleigh, NC, while in a long-distance relationship. Constant travel has the effect of displacing me physically as well as emotionally. A body of work emerged from this experience in which nothing is exactly what it appears at first glance. In an attempt to remedy those feelings of dislocation, I decided to videotape the flights, finally creating a video that condensed a year of travel into two minutes. The graphite drawings appear to be abstractions but are instead are land masses, water or clouds, based on stills from the accompanying dvd projection, and the black on black painting is almost invisible, coming into view only as one passes in front of them and can be read as water or light or reflection.